Joan Oates Institute

2025 Summer Course

Monday, June 9 – Friday, June 13, 2025

8:30 AM - 4:30 PM

This five-day course will be held in-person at the University of Richmond. Breakfast, lunch, and snacks are provided each day.

We’re excited to announce that artist Lynda Barry will join us again for the 30th anniversary Joan Oates Institute in 2025! Watch the video to learn more about Barry and her work. And register to attend a free public talk and book signing with Barry on Tuesday, June 10, at 7 p.m.

It's just good teaching

The Joan Oates Institute (JOI) trains PK-12 educators and community experts to engage and empower all students through creative and experiential methods, reflection, and collaboration.

Participants will experience hands-on workshops that integrate community and culture into your instructional practice through the arts and technology.

Who should attend?

PK-12 Educators

Current teachers, administrators, specialists, coordinators, and coaches can register for the course for graduate credit at our discounted PD rate, or as non-credit professional learning. Current degree-seeking students may enroll as an elective.

Community Artists and Experts

Individual teaching artists, arts and cultural staff, informal educators, community professionals, and subject matter experts should register for Professional Learning. Please inquire if you are interested in graduate credit or pursuing a degree.

Transformative Professional Development

This institute will transform how you teach. Educators will learn from and with regional and national-level artists and experts this summer, with time built in to each day for collaborative planning best practices.

The driving question of our training is, “How do we learn?” This informs the thinking tools we provide so that you can connect curricular content to real-world experiences for students, practicing place-based education and supporting social emotional learning.

Powerful Outcomes

You will discover a teaching and learning model designed to engage your students in deep and culturally responsive learning, both inside and outside of the school setting. View the modules in the drop down menus below for descriptions of each workshop and instructor.

In this course, you will learn how to:

engage and empower students by connecting their backgrounds and interests to community expertise and resources
integrate diverse cultures to help students contextualize curriculum in the real world
explore big ideas through lenses of multiple disciplines in an interactive, hands-on setting
provide a range of creative mediums to assess comprehension in authentic and innovative ways
develop interdisciplinary lessons and unit plans to use in your teaching

The course may be taken for up to 50 hours of professional development, or as a graduate credit course eligible for tuition reimbursement by many school divisions.

Course Details

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Objectives
- Understand the philosophy, techniques, and impacts of a multimodal, interdisciplinary approach to teaching
- Practice inquiry-based educational methods that incorporate arts, technology, culture, and community, and examine how they influence academic and social-emotional outcomes
- Learn how to view and apply the arts to curricular instruction and assessment with students
Outcomes

Participants will create an educational plan to integrate the arts into their local school curriculum, learn about arts integration resources, and join a network of professional colleagues interested in integrating creativity and sparking curiosity in classrooms. The innovative lessons and unit plans developed in this course can become the basis of a grant proposal, PBL, or IB project.
2025 Modules
Day 1: Integrated Learning 101
- Foundations of Integrated Learning: Partners in the Arts Director Rob McAdams (ft. Dr. Lisa Donovan x Dr. Wiktoria Furrer) will kick off the week modeling how we learn, how to align and objectively assess curricular content through creative collection strategies, and how to build a learning community based on equity, trust, and candor. Educators will access the framework for integrated instruction and assessment tools to begin a unit plan.
- Sketchbooks: Make it your own and discover prompts and protocols for reflection.
- Drawing Words and Speaking Pictures: Lynda Barry will guide you through a lively drawing jam where anyone can create instant characters and stories — no artistic skill required, just a willingness to draw bravely. Experience the thrill of fast drawing techniques that spark spontaneous visual storytelling.
Day 2: Exploring Creative Practices
- Writing The Unthinkable: Lynda Barry continues her hands-on workshop exploring how drawing and writing unlock vivid, unwilled memories — the kind that flood us as we see, listen, or move through the world, then turning them into living stories. Through quick, fearless techniques, she’ll show you how to capture these moments on the page, improving literacy and visual communication in the process.
- Teacher as B-person (Breakin’): B-Boy Rave “Seven” Williams teaches the fundamentals of breakdance culture, techniques, and house dance, and how to connect movement to your content area.
- Learning With Arcgis Storymaps: Educators will be introduced to how we use the StoryMap data visualization tool for direct instruction, virtual field trips, independent learning, and e-portfolios.
- Lynda Barry Keynote Presentation: Discover how Lynda’s driving question, “What is an Image?” led to a career as a cartoonist, painter, writer, illustrator, and teacher. She will inspire all, exposing our innate creative ability to work with images and what the biological function of this thing we call ‘the arts’ may be. Register online.
Day 3: Exploring and Capturing Community Stories
- Slow Journalism: Former National Geographic editor and reporter Don Belt shares his curriculum based on the Out of Eden Walk and will guide participants through close observation, mapping, photo/video basics, and interviewing processes.
- Walk About: Practice Slow Journalism with your sketchbook in hand to capture close observations with open eyes, ears, and bodies.
- River City Project: Rob Andrejewski and Daniel Hart from UR Sustainability will share the River City Project and give an overview of experiential practices through the lens of sustainability while authentically connecting students to the environment.
- Art as a Vehicle for Social Change: Mark Strandquist, multi-media artist and community organizer, will showcase a spectrum of collaborative projects, dive deep into the process, and provide a creative toolbox for teachers. He will connect elements of Slow Journalism, Sustainability, and art processes to amplify individual stories and build deep connections to the world and people around us.
- Using Culturally Situated Design Tools: Ron Eglash’s CSDT, Culture and STEM+C, collide by studying “heritage algorithms” in everything from Native beadwork to urban graffiti.
- Discovering Community with ArcGIS: Educators will use their own communities to research projects in American Panorama: An Atlas of United States History and analyze the systems and policies that impact their communities as they tell their personal stories from where they live and work.
Day 4: Making the Connections
- Tastes Like Music: Studio artist Nelly Kate guides participants in combining spatial audio and text to create a series of sensory translations by treating sound objects like landmarks through field recordings and audio arrangements and describing sonic and visual information in terms of flavors, aromas, and tactile sensations.
- Teacher as Curator – Arts as a Regional Strategy: Dr. Lisa Donovan brings her theater and assessment work together to build teacher efficacy in ongoing assessments of creative performance tasks.
Day 5: Empower, Reflect, Share and Celebrate
- Harnessing Spoken Word: Paula Gillian-Akinwole will harness spoken word with a process of performance and experimentation with the different ways performed poetry can engage, empower, and amplify student voice.
- Curriculum Slam: Participants share ideas that have been sparked during the week and how they may integrate creative expertise into their classrooms during the school year.
- 30th Summer Institute Celebration: Join the PIA community for a great happy hour party from 4-6:30 p.m. Register online.

2025 Instructors

Rob McAdams, M.F.A.

Rob McAdams (he/him) is director of Partners in the Arts at the University of Richmond. He has been teaching and coaching for over two decades, working with educators across Virginia, NW Switzerland, Guatemala, and Santa Catarina, Brazil. McAdams co-authored and was UR’s Principal Investigator on a $1.3M Department of Education grant to develop and implement the Arts Integrated Learning Certificate in partnership with Richmond Public Schools. Rob has presented nationally for Project Zero, NAEA, the AEP, and more. Previous roles include being Richmond Director for Young Audiences VA, teaching in the VCU Art Foundations department, and serving as president of the 1708 Gallery.

Lynda Barry

Lynda Barry (she/her) is a graphic novelist, cartoonist, and educator known for blending words and images to explore life’s complexities. Her comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek ran for 30 years, expanding the emotional range of comics. She has authored 21 books, including Making Comics, which won an Eisner Award. A MacArthur Fellow, Barry teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and leads workshops on creativity. Her work has earned numerous awards, and she continues to inspire artists and non-artists alike to embrace storytelling. Barry’s influence spans literature, comics, and education, making her a transformative figure in the arts.

Ravé Williams

A lifelong Richmond native, Ravé Williams’ (he/him) interest in dance had him studying different genres up and down the East Coast. Rave attended the School of Richmond Ballet, This is Kaos Dance Convention, Monsters of Hip Hop Dance Convention, Alvin Ailey’s Summer Intensive, Bates Dance Festival, and Center for the Arts at Henrico High School. He is well versed in many genres, but his passion has always been Hip Hop. Rave has been blessed to be a part of TEDx Talk, earn scholarships for Monsters of Hip Hop and Liberate Artists, and be nominated for Best Hip Hop Choreography and Best Hip Hop Freestyle in RVA Dance Awards.

Don Belt

An adjunct journalism professor at the University of Richmond, Don Belt (he/him) traveled to more than 80 countries over the past three decades as a National Geographic magazine writer and editor. As senior editor from 1998 to 2010, he helped to guide the magazine’s coverage of topics ranging from weapons of mass destruction and the use of terrorism to the legacy of colonialism in the modern Middle East. Hired as a caption writer in 1985, he later served as the magazine’s expeditions editor, its foreign editor, and its chief foreign correspondent. His work has won various awards, including from Communications Arts, the Association of North American Travel Writers, and the American Society of Magazine Editors (National Magazine Award).

Rob Andrejewski, Ph.D.

Rob Andrejewski (he/him) is the director of sustainability at the University of Richmond, where he works to bring awareness to today’s biggest issues and connect individuals with their unique ability to respond in a meaningful way. Andrejewski received his doctorate from Penn State University in Recreation, Park & Tourism Management, which influenced the development of his camp-counselor-for-the-Earth approach to his work. He is a Senior Fellow in the Environmental Leadership Program and recently served as Board President of the International Society of Sustainability Professionals.

Daniel Hart, M.S.

Daniel Hart (he/him) is associate director of sustainability and environmental justice at the University of Richmond. As a community planner, educator, facilitator and sustainability practitioner, Daniel’s work supports the creation of conditions for a more equitable, just, and livable world. He holds a master’s degree in Community Planning and certifications in Permaculture Design and Peace and Conflict Studies. Outside of UR, Hart serves as the chair of the City of Richmond’s Sustainability and Resilience Commission and is Affiliate Faculty in the School of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Cincinnati.

Mark Strandquist

Mark Strandquist (he/him) creates immersive exhibitions, interactive photo-based public art, and multimedia projects that have connected communities impacted by the criminal justice system with hundreds of thousands of people. His work has been exhibited in museums, galleries, and universities, as well as through parades, church-basement legal clinics, and illegal wheat-paste installations. He has received multiple awards, fellowships, and national residencies, and reached wide audiences through major outlets like the NY Times, BBC, NPR, PBS, VICE, and many others. He founded the Performing Statistics project, and, through fellowships from A Blade of Grass and Open Societies, co-founded the People’s Paper Co-op with his partner Courtney Bowles. To learn more about his work, visit nomovement.com.

Nelly Kate Anderson, M.F.A.

Nelly Kate Anderson (she/her) is a studio artist whose sound practice explores material power through tones, tapes, water, wood, metal, and fiber. Her work includes installations, performances, and prints. As a hearing person with a decade of Deaf Gain experience, her practice highlights slowness, awkward inclusion, collaboration, and repetition. She fosters public imagination and healing, often using trash and repurposed materials. Nelly holds an MFA in Print Media from Cranbrook Academy of Art and is a visiting professor at Northeastern University.

Lisa Donovan, Ph.D.

Dr. Lisa Donovan (she/her) is a professor in the Fine and Performing Arts Department at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Previously, she served at Lesley University‚ as Director of the Creative Arts in Learning Division. Donovan has broad experience as an arts educator and administrator in arts organizations, and spearheaded several projects that foreground the use of the arts as a strategy for regional change. She directs the Creative Compact for Collective Impact and co-founded and directs the Berkshire Regional Arts Integration Network (BRAINworks). She has published widely and presented across the country and internationally on arts integration, rural arts education, and arts integration assessment.

Paula G. Akinwole

Paula G. Akinwole (she/her) is a poet and author residing in Petersburg, Virginia. Owner of PGARTistry LLC, she works as a therapeutic/creative writing teacher and is the chief editor of the internationally recognized blog For Lack Of Better Words. She is the author of “All The Boys,” “Under‚” and “Parables & The Gold Plated Things,” and has been published multiple times in books, TV, and theater. Paula positions herself as a creative powerhouse who tells stories, shares poetry and teaches honest expression. Her many projects include the four-part Small Start book series. To follow her work, visit www.lackofbetter.com.

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